Ryoko and Joseph Goguen visited Tokyo from 7 to 22 December 2003, sponsored
by Keio University, where Ryoko was a Special Lecturer for the academic year
2003-2004, and where Joseph visited the new Center for Integrated Research on
the Mind, hosted by Prof. Mitsu Okada.

On 9 December, Ryoko and Joseph gave a Concert/Lecture at Keio University
entitled "Improvisation, Situatedness and Embodiment in Music," a special
lecture for the Faculty of Literature, organized by Prof. Mitsu Okada; here is
an abstrarct:

Nearly all listeners assign prime importance to subjective aspects of music,
such as emotional tone. But many philosophers downplay, ignore, or even
deny such aspects of experience. Moreover, traditional philosophies of
music try to decontextualize it, or, what is almost as bad, to reify the
notion of context. We give musical examples exploring the structure of
qualitative experience, showing for example that it is multi-layered,
non-compositional, situation dependent, and involves non-linear time. Using
improvisation as an example, we show that embodiment and social context are
especially important aspects of situatedness. Our examples disconfirm
various philosophical theories, and our explanations draw on recent work
from cognitive science, including blending, image schemas, and sensory
memory

On 10 December, Joseph gave a talk at Keio University entitled
"Interdisciplinarity in Consciousness Studies," at a Symposium on
Consciousness Research, sponsored by the Center for the Integrated Study of
Mind, and organized by Prof. Mitsu Okada.

On 11 December, Joseph gave a lecture at the University of Tokyo, Dept of
Electrical Engineering, entitled "Computational Narrative and Structural
Blending," an abstract for which is below. It was hosted by Prof Toyoaki
Nishida.

Multimedia display technology is advancing rapidly, and already supports
powerful forms of interactive narrative, art, and entertainment. However,
adequate conceptual and computational support for content is comparatively
primitive. To address this gap, we consider computational models for
narrative, with an eye towards narrative-based gaming, art, and
entertainment. The approach applies research from socio-linguistics on how
humans understand and construct narratives, and recent research from
cognitive linguistics on metaphors and images, to suggest algorithms for
producing narrative structure and content. Our current work is focused on an
algorithm for computing structural blends, intended for the interactive
production of rich displays with variable content, building on prior work on
formal representations for user interface design.

Following the lecture, Prof Nishida took Ryoko and Joseph to a lovely fish
restaurant in Tsukuji. Here are some photos taken by Prof Nishida:

On 15 December, Joseph and Ryoko had diner with Mario Tokoro, President
of Sony Computer Science at a magnificent tempura restaurant, with a ride back
to the hotel in the largest car in Tokyo.

On 16 December, Joseph and Ryoko had diner with Prof Masako Hiraga and
her husband at a wonderful sushi restaurant, Midori Zushi. Masaki is a
linguist who applies blending to poetry and the evolution of language, and her
husband Montant is an innovative architect.

On 19 December, Joseph and Ryoko had lunch with Tashitada Doi (designer
of the Sony Aibo robot dog) and Dr Ken Mogi of Sony, and visited the Sony
Computer Science Lab.

On 19 December, Ryoko performed at the Red Hot Pepper Club with Tashitada
Doi and others.

On 19 December, Joseph gave a lecture on "Consciousness and Music" with a
performance by Ryoko, at the Research Center for the Arts and Art
Administration at Keio Univeristy, hosted by Prof. Keizo Miyasaka. The
audience included several people associated with butoh dancing.

On 20 December, Ryoko performed and Joseph talked a little, at the Qualia Manifesto 2003 end of year
party in at a jazz club in Shibuya, hosted by Dr Ken Mogi of Sony and Prof
Takashi Ikegami of the University of Tokyo. A number of arts professionals
were present, and there were several other performances and informal talks at
the event. Here are some photos taken at the party by Michie Iwatsuki, a designer in the Miyaki Studio: